Born in 1962 in Phoenix, Arizona, and raised on a farm in South Dakota, Michael Abels showed musical promise when he was only four. His grandparents persuaded the local music teacher to take him on as a student, and by the age of eight, he started composing music. He attended the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, later studying West African drumming techniques at California Institute of the Arts. While he is perhaps best known today for his collaborations with director Jordan Peele, writing the scores for the movies Get Out, Us, and Nope, his opera Omar, co-composed with Rhiannon Giddens, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023. Critics have lauded his distinctive musical voice; as one reviewer said of his orchestral style, “… the way Abels combines the African and Deep South vocals … with … traditionally dissonant and challenging orchestral horror scoring is very impressive indeed.”
Co-commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Music Festival, and the Sarasota Orchestra, Amplify received its world premiere in June 2025.
As Abels writes of the work,
Amplify is a rhapsodic piece inspired by the 1812 Overture, which is itself a rhapsody of popular tunes engaged in a musical battle. Today in the US, the 1812 Overture is often performed for Independence Day, in spite of it having been commissioned to celebrate a Russian victory—a battle which was not necessarily a victory at all depending on whose version of the history you believe. Amplify is essentially an American musical competition for prominence and dominance via volume and interruption, where the loudest, most rousing ideas become the focus, regardless of merit. On one level, the piece is a joyful homage to Tchaikovsky’s favorite compositional techniques, with exciting chromatic sequences, hummable melodies (some of which may be borrowed), and yes, even fireworks. But the boisterousness comes at the cost of the more vulnerable, fulfilling ideas, like a dessert that interrupts dinner. In the coda an alarm goes off, which is gleefully ignored. It is a piece meant to be enjoyed with caution.
